The personal blog of Peter Lee a.k.a. "China Hand"... Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel, and an open book to those who read. You are welcome to contact China Matters at the address chinamatters --a-- prlee.org or follow me on twitter @chinahand.

Friday, April 05, 2013

Pale Rider: Roger Ebert, Death, and The Grey

By a creepy coincidence, I watched the man vs. wolf in the
Arctic thriller The Grey the same
week that Roger Ebert died.

Creepy because The
Grey is a relentless meditation on death and Roger Ebert, who had already
experienced his first, traumatic bout of cancer when the film came out in 2012,
had this to say about the effect that the movie had on him:

I was…stunned with
despair. It so happened that there were two movies scheduled that day in the
Lake Street Screening Room (where we local critics see many new releases).
After "The Grey" was over, I watched the second film for 30 minutes
and then got up and walked out of the theater. It was the first time I've ever
walked out of a film because of the previous film. The way I was feeling in my
gut, it just wouldn't have been fair to the next film.

Caution:
non-stop spoilers from here on in.

In The Grey
everybody dies.Literally everybody, and
I mean “literally” literally.After a
plane crash strands them in the Arctic at the mercy of a wolfpack, all humans
die.The crazy guy dies, the cool black
guy dies, the bragging ex-con dies, the religious guy dies, the together young
guy dies…and Liam Neeson dies…after cursing god and mourning life’s utter lack
of meaning.

Don’t be fooled by the “thriller” peg that the marketing
team tried to hang on the movie.When
Liam Neeson pulls out his hunting knife and straps glass shards on his fists to
go mano a lobo, he’s not headed for victory, a trip on a
rescue helicopter, and a tearfully happy family reunion. It’s his last step into annihilation.

The Grey eschews
feel-good kick-ass/triumph of the spirit clichés for nihilistic/atheistic/existentialist
European art-house inspired angst.Pretty amazing that a US studio gave it the green light, and that the
film makers weren’t flayed by the Christian/family values crowd for the no
god/no afterlife pessimism.

Understandably, given the film’s interest in tackling the
big questions head-on, The Grey appeared
on several ten-best lists.

Aside from Roger Ebert’s passing, the movie gains additional
pathos from the depiction of Liam Neeson (whose wife, Natasha Richardson, had
perished in a skiing accident) as experiencing suicidal despair after the death
of his wife.The co-producer of the
film, Tony Scott—who urged the director, Jay Carnahan, not to change a thing,
presumably after the studios balked at the film’s unmarketable howl of
despair-- committed suicide in 2012 by jumping off the Vincent Thomas Bridge in
Long Beach for reasons that are not publicly known (initial reports that he
killed himself over an inoperable brain tumor were apparently incorrect).

The only people that really gave The Grey a hard time were wolf defenders, who took umbrage at the
depiction of the pack as death-dealing psychos instead of supremely adaptive
kingpins of a complex and unforgiving arctic ecosystem.

I had my problems with the movie’s depiction of wolf-related
human mortality incidents.The wolves
are allegorical stand-ins for Death with a capital D and display little of the intelligence, patience, coordination, and endurance I
imagine a real-life pack could have brought to bear if it decided to harvest the
vulnerable, meat-heavy crowd of humans that foolishly abandoned the crash site
to seek “safety” in the woods (in the final irony, just before dying, Neeson
understands that, instead of leading the group to deliverance, he has brought them
straight to the wolves’ den where, according to the movie, the pack is utterly dedicated
to exterminating any interlopers).

Another problem springs from the depiction of death as “something
that slides over you”.In one of the
film’s most moving scenes, Neeson’s character coaxes a mortally wounded crash
survivor into confronting, accepting, and even welcoming his own death.This comforting—and, in the case of somebody
experiencing rapid and fatal exsanguination thanks to uncontrollable bleeding
from a major artery, perhaps relatively realistic--scenario is overused in the
subsequent demise of several characters.

Not speaking from personal experience, I nevertheless am
pretty sure that dismemberment at the paws and jaws of even an efficient
carnivore like a wolf (and I’m not even talking about the ad hoc mayhem inflicted by
a bear that has decided to exercise its prerogative as an opportunistic
omnivore to add human flesh to its diet) is terrifying and painful.

Ironically for this profoundly skeptical film, the idea that it isn’t sprang from 19th-century
religion’s rear-guard battle against Darwinism.

Attempting to offer an alternative to the overarching Darwinist order shaped by struggle, mortality, extinction, and
natural selection, religious figures tried to construct an alternative model of
the natural world in which god’s wisdom and benevolence was manifest in every
aspect of nature.

The evidence of savagery in carnivore operations proved a
hard religious sell, since it was difficult to understand why god would allow a
big cat to rip open Bambi’s abdomen and devour her steaming guts before her
horrified, dying eyes.

One proposed solution was to claim that the victims were
spared excessive pain and suffering.The
noted African missionary, David Livingstone (as in, “Dr. Livingstone, I
presume…”), gave credence to this view with a famous account—which I remember
vividly from reading it as a child—of the state of dreamy, painless acceptance
he drifted into as he was being mauled by a lion during one of his African
sojourns:

...looking half round I saw the lion in the act of springing upon me. He caught me by the shoulder and we both came to the ground together. Growling horribly he shook me as a terrier dog does a rat. The shock produced a stupor similar to that which seems to be felt by a mouse after the first gripe of the cat. It
caused a sort of dreaminess in which there was no sense of pain nor
feeling of terror though I was quite conscious of all that was
happening. It was like what patients partially under the
influence of chloroform describe: they see the operation but do not feel
the knife. This placidity is probably produced in all animals killed by
the carnivora and if so is a merciful provision of Creator for
lessening the pain of death.

As a counter-example, the Darwinists rummaged through
natural history to come up with the hideous story of the wasp that lays eggs on
a living, perambulating caterpillar; the larva hatch and eat their host
alive.Apparently, this is accompanied
by the agonized writhing of the caterpillar, which nobody tried to
spin into evidence of an ecstatic acceptance of god’s will...but was good enough to inspire Ridley Scott's Alien.

However, in a famous 1982 essay, evolutionist/atheist Stephen Gould turned the tables and took Darwinists to task for anthropomorphizing caterpillar suffering, instead of simply accepting with cool detachment the crude, unconquerable power of biological adaptation. Indeed, it's recently been discovered that a symbiotic virus injected by the wasp invades the caterpillar's brain, exciting it to active cooperation to assure the success of its parastic brood.

But even if the caterpillar is not hating the whole eaten-alive-from-inside thing too much, the scenario still doesn't look like god's master plan.

Death sucks and if, as The
Grey believes, that’s all there is, I don’t blame the filmmakers too much
for trying to sugarcoat it a bit.